because I don't like Martians . . . they just
don't fall within my skill set," she wrote
in the introduction to "In Other Worlds:
SF and the Human Imagination," an
essay collection that she published in
.) The ritualized procreation in the
novel---e ectively, state-sanctioned
rape---is extrapolated from the Bible.
" 'Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto
her; and she shall bear upon my knees,
that I may also have children by her,' "
Atwood recited. "Obviously, they stuck
the two together and out came the baby,
and it was given to Rachel. No kidding.
It is right there in the text." In Atwood's
book, the Handmaids are cultivated, like
livestock. "I'm taken to the doctor's once
a month, for tests: urine, hormones, can-
cer smear, blood test," O red recounts.
"The same as before, except that now it's
obligatory." Only after completing sev-
eral chapters does the reader queasily re-
alize that O red's innocuous-sounding
name is a designation of ownership: the
Commander in whose household the
narrator serves is named Fred. A decade
ago, the book was banned from high
schools in Judson, Texas, on the ground
that it was anti-Christian and excessively
explicit about sex. In an open letter to
the school district, Atwood pointed out
that the Bible has a good deal more to
say about sex than her book does, and
defended her fiction's essential truthful-
ness, speculative or not. "If you see a per-
son heading toward a huge hole in the
ground, is it not a friendly act to warn
him?" she wrote.
With the novel, she intended not just
to pose the essential question of dysto-
pian fiction---"Could it happen here?"---
but also to suggest ways that it had al-
ready happened, here or elsewhere.While
living in West Berlin, Atwood visited
Poland, where martial law had only re-
cently been lifted; many dissidents were
still in jail. She already knew members
of the Polish resistance from the Second
World War, who had gone into exile in
Canada. "I remember one person saying
a very telling thing: 'Pray you will never
have occasion to be a hero,' " she said.
Atwood's longtime literary agent, Phoebe
Larmore, told me of seeing Atwood
during the writing of "The Handmaid's
Tale." "I had been quite ill that year, and
Margaret came and sat on my sofa, and
I think she looked worse than I did,"
Larmore recalled. "I asked her what was
happening. She said, 'It's the new
novel. It scares me. But I have to write it.' "
"The Handmaid's Tale"became a best-
seller, despite some sni y reviews, like
one in the Times, by Mary McCarthy,
who wrote, "Even when I try, in the light
of these palely lurid pages, to take the
Moral Majority seriously, no shiver of
recognition ensues." It has since sold so
many millions of copies that Atwood
considers them uncountable. Her friend
the novelist Valerie Martin was the first
to read the finished manuscript; they
were both teaching in Tuscaloosa, Ala-
bama. "There is kind of a disagreement
about what I said," Martin told me. "She
says that I said, 'There is something in
it.' But what I think I said is: 'You are
going to be rich.' "The book quickly be-
came canonical. Atwood's daughter was
nine when it was published; by the time
she was in high school, it was required
reading for graduation.
Despite the novel's current air of time-
liness, the contours of the dystopian fu-
ture that Atwood imagined in the eight-
ies do not map closely onto the present
moment---although recent news images
of asylum seekers fleeing across the U.S.
border into Canada have a chilling res-
onance with the opening moments of
the television series, which shows Moss,
not yet enlisted as a Handmaid, attempt-
ing to escape from the U.S. to its north-
ern neighbor, where democracy prevails.
Still, the U.S. in does not show im-
mediate signs of becoming Gilead, At-
wood's imagined theocratic American
republic. President Trump is not an ad-
herent of traditional family values; he is
a serial divorcer. He is not known to be
a man of religious faith; his Sundays are
spent on the golf course.
What does feel familiar in "The Hand-
maid's Tale" is the blunt misogyny of the
society that Atwood portrays, and which
Trump's vocal repudiation of "political
correctness"has loosed into common par-
lance today. Trump's vilification of Hil-
lary Clinton, Atwood believes, is more
explicable when seen through the lens of
the Puritan witch-hunts. "You can find
Web sites that say Hillary was actually a
Satanist with demonic powers," she said.
"It is so seventeenth-century that you can
hardly believe it. It's right out of the
"Let me know when those two kids across the street start crying."